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How Music Got Free: What Happens When an Entire Generation Commits the Same Crime by Stephen Witt

An enthralling account of how technology has turned the music business upside down

Nick Hornby

June 7 2015, 1:01am, The Sunday Times

Listen up: Stephen Witt is an enthusiastic and sure-footed guide to the recent revolution in music (Mark Vessey)

At the beginning of this century, Dell Glover, an employee at Universal Music’s pressing plant in North Carolina, began to commit a new kind of crime. Those unfamiliar with the extraordinary advances in the compression of digital recording — and, 15 years ago, that was nearly all of us — wouldn’t have noticed that Glover was doing anything especially innovative. He was helping himself to his employers’ product, as employees have been doing more or less since the concept of employment was invented. And he wasn’t nicking thousands of dollars’ worth of stuff, either. A copy of Jay-Z’s album The Blueprint, say, had a retail price of $15 or so, and only cost $2 of $3 to make. In some ways it was like stealing a teapot,…